Bookings within Service Manager - a discussion

[Steve Giller]

Firstly, I've put this in the General forum as it's not a feature that's available - if it would sit better elsewhere please feel free to move it!

We use Service Manager to accept Requests for "bookings" both of portable assets like projectors and of virtual/fixed assets like rooms.
With the current system this is really a way of tracking the requests; the majority of the work is done with external tools, e.g. Outlook Calendars, spreadsheets etc.
What we'd ultimately like to see (and I appreciate this would probably be a whole new module) is the ability to book an asset, or a combination of assets, from collection/delivery, through set-up to break-down and returning to storage without leaving Service Manager.

I've added "a discussion" to the title as there would be many options to cover and not being involved in the finer points of the process I won't know a lot of them and I'm inviting anyone else who would find this service useful to add their thoughts.

Fundamentally I'm starting with the concept that a booking for the Customer is for a set time, but each asset would have a set-up and breakdown time extending either side of that, and potentially a delivery & collection time for a mobile asset that needs moving from storage to location and back. Rooms would have properties like capacity, facilities available and availability so that you can filter before booking (e.g. Select capacity 50-100, requires projector/screen, for Sunday and only rooms of that size with power etc. that are available at weekends would be selectable.)

Once a booking was made then the relevant asset(s) would be marked unavailable for the whole period to prevent them being requested - the issue we currently have is a customer telling a colleague "Oh, I finish at 5 so you can have the projector from then." The colleague then gets angry when their projector arrives 30 minutes later after being disconnected and transported to another building from the first event that overran ...

I've got colleagues thinking about a wishlist, but I'd welcome comments from other SM users with their ideas, and from Hornbill about whether something like this would be feasible.